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Early Voting Problems, Open Source Alternative
Techdirt makes note of some problems cropping up already for early voters in the presidential election. CNN covers some of the issues, including machines in a West Virginia county which recorded some votes incorrectly because of an alignment error. A lengthy discussion of the problems was also featured on NPR. Reader Rooked_One points out a related story at NPR about a voting program called PVOTE, written in Python and only 500 lines long. "Pvote is not a complete voting system. It is just the software program that interacts with the voter. Other necessary functions, such as voter registration, ballot preparation, and canvassing, are not part of Pvote. It is especially important that the voter interaction be correct because it is the only part of an election that must take place in private, whereas all other parts of an election can and should be subjected to public oversight and verification."
Why can't the US do what we do in Canada? You don't have to make this complicated.
In Canada, we show up to our polling station with our voter card, show the card and receive a ballot. We take the ballot, which has the names of the candidates and their party in large font very clearly, and put an X in the big circle beside the candidate we're voting for.
Thats it! No fancy machines, no complicated forms, and no computers to go wrong or be hacked.
See this image:
http://www.elections.ca/yth/images/sample_ballot.gif
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
Lets put it like this: The Black Forest town of Villingen-Schwenningen has something called "unechte Teilortswahl" (literally translated: "not really an election per suburb"). Basicly every suburb has some seats reserved for their local candidates, but there are no party lists for each suburb, every party has a list for the whole of Villingen-Schwenningen. Each party can nominee as much candidates on its list as there are seats in the town council. With up to 20 parties running, this can easily amout to about ~450 candidates. It has happened that the voting ballot for the town council was a square metre!
Now the voter can either accept the whole list of one party, or he has as much votes as there are seats in the council. Those votes he can distribute freely: all on one candidate ("cumulate") or evenly distributed between candidates of different lists, or some of the votes on a single candidate, and others on other candidates... it's completely up to him. He can even write new candidates on the lists and give them votes.
During the count one determines which candidate got the most votes in his suburb, he gets a direct seat. If the suburb has a second seat, also the second best candidate gets a second seat etc.pp. But because different parties are running, it can happen, that other lists got many votes on their lists, but are not represented by the suburb. Then they get so called "Ausgleichsmandate" (compensatory mandates). Those are additional seats in the town council. In the end the council thus consists of as many candidates from the different lists as the relative number of votes the lists demands. With all those compensatory mandates the town council can often double or triple the number of seats.
I watch the results at Real Clear Politics and the aggregates/projections from Pollster, Princeton, and 538. Advertising budgets for the various candidates and states are also public. Less solid evidence includes leaked internal memos about the parties own projections for success or failure. McCain has surrendered most of the Kerry swing states, and his last hope is to try to take Pennsylvania, which has gone Democratic in the last four elections. Obama, meanwhile, wins by holding Colorado and New Hampshire (likely) or getting at least one of the big swing states (also likely). He's averaging +9% in the (still-rising) national polls, and is competitive in once-secure states like North Dakota and North Carolina. As we can see from early voting results so far, he has a better ground game, and from the beginning has had a better organized campaign. I know the race is expected to tighten, but it would have to tighten a *lot* to make it "very close".
Right now, all evidence is that the race will not be close, and that it would take a major gaffe from Obama to change that. It could happen -- nobody's saying it's over till it's over -- but as the McCain campaign continues to get bad press over Sarah Palin and Republican supporters form a circular firing squad, this race is looking more like 1992 than 2000.
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